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Cup of Coffee: July 28, 2007

Cup of Coffee Why was Nick Punto in the lineup Friday night? Can only be one thing: Scrubini Fixation.

This entry was posted by SBG on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 7:23 am and is filed under Cup of Coffee. It is one of 3094 entries by the author. We are no longer accepting Letters to the Editor on this post.

8 comments to Cup of Coffee: July 28, 2007

  • Jeff A
    July 28th, 2007 at 2:21 pm

    Keeping up with the ex-Twins: Grant Balfour has been designated for assignment by Milwaukee.

    • ubelmann
      July 28th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

      ~68 K in 43 IP in AA and AAA this year. He just can't stay healthy. If the Twins wind up trading a reliever or something, it'd at least be interesting to see what he could do in AAA with more innings.

  • ubelmann
    July 28th, 2007 at 3:54 pm

    I'm watching Tigers-Angels on FOX right now (because they determine what baseball I get to watch this time of the week), and they mentioned that Mike Soscia makes Reggie Willits run laps for every HR he hits in BP. I can think of some Twins' hitters that might benefit from this rule.

  • Moss
    July 29th, 2007 at 7:11 am

    Anyone have any comments on the HOF inductees?

    Amazingly, Gwynn never had an OPS+ of less than 100, and none lower than 111 from '84 on. The same can't be said of Ripken, who dipped below 100 a number of times.

    Was Gwynn injured a fair amount? It looks like he missed 15-20 games in several seasons. (Again, the same can't be said of Ripken.) Since he was in the NL, Moss didn't see him much...regrettably.

  • CarterHayes
    July 29th, 2007 at 9:06 am

    Sounds like his knees were the problem. Gwynn was a pretty good base-stealing threat earlier on in his career, but the knees slowed him down considerably. He also injured a tendon at some point pretty seriously, I seem to remember. An AP article from 28 June 2001 sheds a bit of light on his injury history:

    Gwynn wanted to delay the announcement as long as possible because didn't want the fanfare of a farewell tour. But he's been injured most of the year and finally got tired of answering questions about his future. And he figured the fans should have a chance to say goodbye, too.

    Gwynn said he originally wanted to retire at the end of 2000, but he wanted to redeem himself after being limited to a career-low 36 games after having his sixth surgery on his left knee.

    "Obviously it hasn't gone the way I wanted it to go the last couple of years, but all in all, I think I did OK," he said. "I think I did all right."

    Because of his injury history, the Padres put Gwynn through the wringer in negotiating a one-year deal last winter, after he had filed for free agency for the first time.

  • Whiffers
    July 29th, 2007 at 9:55 am

    While looking around at Baseball-Reference.com , I found a couple things interesting.

    First, do you think Terry Ryan is still kicking himself over this one:

    December 15, 2005: Signed as a Free Agent with the Minnesota Twins.

    Especially when I saw this while looking up Ty Wigginton's stats:

    December 8, 2005: Released by the Pittsburgh Pirates.

    January 10, 2006: Signed as a Free Agent with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

    Wigginton's .789 OPS the year he was released by the Pirates was higher than anything Batista had done since 2000. I'm pretty sure his defense wasn't worse than Fatista.

    But I had no idea I'd see this when looking up just how much Nick Punto exceeded his career averages:

    June 3, 1997: Drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the 33rd round of the 1997 amateur draft, but did not sign.

    Suddenly it all makes sense. The Twins wanted Punto for so long there was no way they'd give up on him 10 years later.

  • Algonad
    July 29th, 2007 at 12:34 pm

    Did anybody see Harmon Killebrew's quote in the paper? When asked about Bonds breaking the home run record he joked that "maybe we should just shoot him." I know he was joking and trying to break some of the tension but in light of the death threats received by Aaron, it was in poor taste.